Huntington Students Offer Insights on Oreos

Article Written by Jocelyn Meek, Communications Officer of Brockton Public Schools.  Article posted on the bpsma.org website 

Though it might have passed the world by with little fanfare, on Friday, March 6th, Marybeth O’Brien’s 4th grade class at the Huntington School was celebrating an auspicious occasion: the 97th anniversary of the Oreo cookie. That’s right, that delectable creamy filling sandwiched between two rich chocolate cookies first appeared on shelves on that date in 1912.

Throughout the morning, the 4th graders dipped and dunked the monochromatic cookies in milk as they watched commercials touting the timelessness of the treats. The students took notes on the different themes of Oreo advertisements through the ages, carefully cataloging the different adjectives used by admen to sell their product and jotting ideas about what Oreos mean to them.

Later in the day, the students wrote essays on themes: “How I Eat an Oreo,” “Who I like to Eat Oreos With” or “If I only Had One Oreo Left, Who Would I Give it To?” Finally, they produced short commercials of their own using their writing as a means of selling the traditional snack treat.

“Descriptive writing is an important part of the MCAS test and an area that I think we need to work on, so I was looking for a fun way to get the students interested and invested in writing,” O’Brien said. “Since it just happened to be the Oreo anniversary, I thought it would be a good way to get the creative juices flowing. And who doesn’t love an Oreo?”

To illustrate her points using technology, O’Brien downloaded old Oreo commercials from YouTube to get her students thinking. She gave them the cookies and milk to give them a first person perspective, and then she had them use their Writing Ladder to gather and organize ideas, draft a storyline, revise their stories to elaborate and clarify their central points, proofread and edit their copy and then share their work.

Brittany Czarnowski, 9, thought the Oreo assignment was tops.

“Its yummy and its really fun,” she said, grinning. “Miss O’Brien plans fun ways for us to learn all the time.”

Anthony Camacho was equally enthusiastic.

“Just the fact that we’re learning about commercials and Oreos – and that we get to actually eat Oreos in class – that’s pretty fun. And it made me think about the words they use in commercials and how you can learn from TV sometimes,” Anthony said. “We get to do cool things with the computer, too, like make our own commercials.”

O’Brien says she tries to use technology, including the interactive whiteboard, streaming video and the digital video camera, to get students enthused about learning. Not every child learns the same, and it’s important to find different ways to catch their attention and focus them on the lessons at hand, she said.

“Whenever I can find a way to get them excited about the material, I try to do that. They’re not even noticing how much they are learning, because they’re so excited about the Oreo theme, and getting to watch commercials. But if you look at their notebooks, they are taking more and better notes than they would if I were just lecturing, and they are certainly more invested,” she said. “Hopefully, this will be a great experience that they can use to write about on MCAS or in other writing assignments later in the year.”

Developed in the National Biscuit Company’s (Nabisco) New York factory, the black and white sandwich cookie has come to be one of the nation’s favorite snacks and is billed as “Milk’s favorite cookie.” Since their inception, more than 362 billion Oreos have been sold all over the world, in a variety of flavors and shapes.

No one really knows where the Oreo got its name, but Kraft Foods (which owns Nabisco) lays out a few theories on its website:

1. OREO was named by taking the “RE” out of cream and sandwiching it between the two “O”s from chocolate – just like the cookie.2. The name comes from the word “OR” (meaning gold in French) – a color used on early packaging designs.3. OREO comes from the Greek word “OREO” which means mountain or hill. When the cookies were first manufactured, it was shaped like a baseball mound – hence the name OREO.4. Some say the name came about because it just seemed like a nice, melodic combination of sounds with just a few catchy letters and it was easy to pronounce.

Podcasting

Greetings DEN Members,

 This summer vacation sure has flown by! There is no better way to get back into the swing of things than by taking a few workshops.  My district sent me to a hands-on Apple Professional Development Podcasting Institute.  As a techie, I was thrilled to be going, for one reason above all others was that we were given the IPOD Classic/Video with an 80GB memory.  This was such a perk! This workshop was well paced, we were all comfortable to ask questions and work with the information given.  We used a great deal of Mac applications like garageband and iphoto.  These programs were so user friendly that it put my PC to shame.  However, this is nothing to hold the PC users back…the members of the class were so helpful that we all pooled our resources and shared quite a few ideas for making this just as easily adapted to that of the PC.  The pc version of garage band is that of Acoustica’s MixCraft 4.  Both programs allow you to create a voice recording, add pictures, music, and sound effects and animate in some ways.  As part of the institute we created little movies using the Aesop’s Fables.  It was really fun, and super easy! I can’t wait to create some great things for my students to use. 

 I would like to share some great websites that we learned about:

www.podomatic.com is a great site that allows you to publish and create your own podcasts.

www.pics4learning.com allows you to download pictures without worrying about copyrights.

www.soundsnap.com has a library full of sound effects that you can download and use again without worrying about those pesky copyright laws.

www.pbwiki.com is a wiki site that allows you to communicate and discuss things with your students…a lot of the teachers in the training were already using this and LOVE it. I can’t wait to try it

As we went through this workshop I realized that I was already creating Podcasts with my students we just weren’t publishing them to a wiki.  So I decided to take some of the projects created by my students last year and turn them into podcasts.  I published them to iTunes.  I was limited at one point because it was not in an iTunes format…rest assured, someone offered a great alternative.  The site www.ZAMZAR.com is a free convertion website.  I simply uploaded my project to this site, identified the file extension I wanted to convert it to (IPOD) and in a few minutes, I was emailed a link to download the new version! It was fabulous!

 I hope you have an opportunity to take a course like this! It was so much fun and so eyeopening to the things you can do!